ABSTRACT
Ethnic minority students record less study success in comparison with their peers from majority backgrounds. This chapter provides to find an answer to the question of why this is so, and what educational programmes can do to reduce these differences. The performances of ethnic minority students improve in programmes in which the social integration of ethnic minority and majority students is good, in which contact with teachers is good, and in which diversity is explicitly referred to as a positive value. The "traditional student" who enters higher education straight from secondary education, who is on the brink of entering their twenties, who studies full-time and whose parents are highly educated with middle or high incomes is no longer the average student. Ethnic minority students, as well as students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, more often choose "high status" subjects such as medicine, law and economics.
